Johannes Schneider

Department Manager

Werdegang

Johannes Schneider studied Electrical and Information Engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Priorities during his studies were Industrial Information Systems, Computational Intelligence and Bio-signal processing. His diploma thesis entitled "Design and integration of a system for capacitive ECG measurement and simultaneous evaluation of context information in a test vehicle" he wrote already at FZI. Since April 2012 he is employed as a visiting researcher at FZI.

In this paper we describe a flexible design for system control and communication in a robotic mobility aid, proof-of-concept in a prototype system and experimental results achieved within a multi-day testing session with a group of potential users. The mobility aid combines the functionalities of a walking aid with active fall prevention and a sit-to-stand transfer assistant in a single device, having a smaller footprint than standard walking aids. We focus on the system communication based on a middleware and describe, how this concept introduces robustness and flexibility to assisting devices like this and how the system can easily be extended with additional functionalities by adding new hardware or software. As examples for additional functionality, health monitoring, entertainment and communication applications are described.